Science and Technology

Glass Overfull

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

There has been a boom, and soon there will be a bust, in global human population. And no advanced civilization will be able to reemerge because we will have used everything up. There will be no oil and gas and other supplies of that nature to maintain any civilization that might emerge from the ashes of this one.

Sunbeams

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I want to be with those who know secret things / or else alone.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “I Am Too Alone”

Sunbeams

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: He is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

Marie Curie

Airborne

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Studies done with animals in labs don’t totally replicate the way humans get infected, which involves mucus, saliva, and other pathogens. We don’t know the full complexity of that interaction.

Past Futures

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

It just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land. When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

A House Is Not a Home

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The buyer closed on the property in late April of this year. Despite all the logical, practical, convincing reasons for the sale, letting go wasn’t easy. The Sun’s offices had been in that house since 1989, and photos of its well-landscaped exterior had become familiar to subscribers, a couple dozen of whom would stroll up the front walk each year and knock on the door, hoping to get a glimpse of where their favorite magazine was produced and to meet the people who created it. If he was in, our founding editor, Sy Safransky, always welcomed them.

A Seat at the Table

wyattww@gmail.com — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The terrible emotions I was filled with are the truth of what it means to be alive. When you live, something else dies. Even if you only eat plants, animals die for you to be able to eat. We do not talk about that often enough.

Become a Friend of The Sun

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The Sun is not immune to the relentless business pressures and tectonic shifts in the media landscape over the last two decades. And while I am grateful these changes have underscored what is vital and unique about The Sun, it seems that every week I read about a worthy publication having to close its doors. We are committed to bringing our readers the best writing and photography, free from the distraction of advertising. With this choice comes the reality that the price of a subscription doesn’t come close to what it costs to print and distribute the magazine and curate the website. As we have throughout our history, we are asking you again, with great humility, to be our partner on this journey and formally become a Friend of The Sun.

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Down in the Valley

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

The Peaceful Circle—Year in a Wild Marsh

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

@grimeygrimey: Projected this on the wall so that it was superimposed on my TV, then dosed LSD and played Mario Kart 64 until dawn. Yoshi was in the willow maze! Don’t hit that muskrat, bro! It was sick.

Sunbeams

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

J.G. Ballard

Is This Desire?

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.

Tangled Avenues

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.

Under Fire

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0500

We’ve got changes playing out now with astounding rapidity. Biologists can see natural selection occurring over the course of a field season. . . . Studying these adaptations can help us identify the issues that are most important and the species that need the most help. This may not make us worry less, but it can help us worry smarter.

This Little Bit I Am Trying To Hold

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:05:00 -0500

Listen to the poets in this month’s special poetry section read their poems about leaving and letting go. To listen, click the play button below each title in the article.

I will leave you, / and I will / leave the sudden // darkness of afternoon thunderstorms / and I will leave / the rain and its patience in shaping mountains

— from “I Will Leave,” by Michael Bazzett

I am here to translate my father’s death / into fruit. Something that can be held. To bring / it up to your lips the way I spooned strawberry / yogurt up to his and said to him the word “Eat.” / There was no use, in the end. There was no hunger.

— from “I Did What I Could to Keep This,” by Peter Markus

Tonight, because all matter is dissolving, you & I / are being gradually undressed by the universe — // silk & wool molecules mingling with cells / rising from skin like souls

— from “Everything,” by Terry Lucas

Deformation Catalog

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

I had thought nobody understood dark matter — that it was, fundamentally, an encapsulation of all we didn’t know. But it turned out other people’s lack of understanding took the form of complex theories, mathematical equations, computer programs that turned impenetrable data into different impenetrable data. Other people’s confusion was a castle you could live inside, a whole architecture of the unknown. My confusion was a wall I kept walking into.

Burning Questions

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0400

A fire manager making a decision may look like they’re in a position of power, but often they really have only one choice: to suppress the fire. If they don’t, they are opening themselves up to a Russian roulette of consequences depending on how the wind blows, quite literally.

No Small Wonder

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400

Emotions aren’t discrete bubbles. They are blending into each other all the time. You might be feeling awe and wonder at the miracle of life, and also realizing that we all die, which perhaps moves you closer to terror. In our work we try to find what’s true in it all.

Total Solar

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400

We took our kids to City Hall Plaza / with its dead-on view / of South Mountain to watch / the moon eclipse our sun / in a certain way we’d been told / wouldn’t happen again / in our lifetime unless we traveled / to a far-off part of the globe.

This Month In Sun History

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 04:00:00 -0400

The Sun’s first-ever website launched in August 1999, into a world of staticky dial-up tones, GeoCities, and frequent buffering. It came about thanks to the generosity of two Sun subscribers. . . . Shelley Sherman and Meredith Tupper took it upon themselves to build a modest, stately website that perhaps undersold the magazine: “If you haven’t heard of The Sun,” the About page read, “you’re not alone.”

Chair/Body/Home

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:05:00 -0400

What would it take for me to no longer want to leave my body? What would it take for me to see my body as my home? I don’t know, really, except perhaps more exposure to different ideas about disability, different ideas about beauty and worth.

Open Ears

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:00:00 -0400

It wouldn’t surprise me if people looked back in twenty or thirty years and said, “This was the Bad Bunny era” — that those Spanish-language musicians have the same kind of influence today as the hip-hop pioneers and the punk pioneers did in the 1970s.

Don’t Panic

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Wed, 31 May 2023 04:00:00 -0400

I’m not talking about burning the system down. . . . I simply think that the things we can do to respond to climate change will also make the world a better place for most people.

The Phone

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 05:00:00 -0500

Prank calls, long-distance connections, secret messages

Out There

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 05:00:00 -0500

I doubt any aliens we might encounter are going to be biological. I think they’re all going to be machines.

I Feel Sorry For Aliens

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 05:00:00 -0500

Lonely nights I walk to the old / elevator that used to hold Montana / grain: beams rusted, train tracks / ripped out, a patchwork of missing / roof panels framing perfect squares / of starlight

Sunbeams

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 05:00:00 -0500

Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Carl Sagan

Under The Surface

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500

Cohen: This summer, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine caused controversy by disclosing a conversation with an AI called LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” The conversation seemed to suggest this AI system had some awareness of itself, but the idea was dismissed by a number of people who work with such systems.

Güzeldere: It’s interesting that Google fired the guy who published that conversation. . . . People are saying, “Oh, it’s just a hack,” but it’s a very impressive hack. I think it will become a product that will be accepted by consumers.

The Enchanted Loom

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500

The brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. . . . It takes many forms: our finding similarities among seemingly unrelated things, wadding up worries into tangled balls of obsession difficult to pierce even with the spike of logic, painting elaborate status or romance fantasies in which we star, picturing ourselves elsewhere and elsewhen.